Compiled by Cecil Poole
Strange how educated people seem to feel they have the right, nay, the duty in fact, to tell the poorer how to live their life.  Joe Bageant suggests this is why the rural poor deserted the Democrats for the Tea Party and other Republican acolytes in his writing  – ‘Rainbow Pie’, and ‘Deer Hunting with Jesus’.  Colonists, missionaries and economic imperialists have done this for aeons with indigenous populations.  We here in Australia have made an art form of it in our dealings with (or is it ‘dictations to’) our indigenous people.

William Cobbett has been lauded for his progressive views by Tarquin O’Flaherty in his Man as Machine series.  Elizabeth David in her English Bread and Yeast Cookery takes the ‘long handle’ to Cobbett (Cottage Economy 1821 – 23) for what she sees as trite and erroneous observations of the life of the British poor in the early nineteenth century.

This is what Elizabeth David has to say.

So to whom, it has to be asked, was William Cobbett addressing himself when he berated agricultural workers for squandering their wages on bought bread, or, in Cobbett’s view the ultimate sin, for feeding their children on boiled potatoes?  today his theatrical cries of outrage make embarrassing reading: ‘how wasteful, then, indeed how shameful for a labourer’s wife to go to the baker’s shop, and how negligent, how criminally careless of the welfare of his family must the labourer be, who permits so scandalous a use of the proceeds of his labour…. Servant women in abundance appear to think that loaves are made by the baker as knights are made by kings.’  Intoxicated with his own rhetoric, he appears to have lost sight of them altogether.  Disregarding the cramped conditions in which most cottagers lived, ignoring their pitifully limited cooking facilities – not to say their illiteracy, which in any case would have prevented them from appreciating his efforts – he failed to mention that even communal ovens were few and far between, that the inconveniences attached to conveying the dough to the nearest bakery were often so great as to make the proposition quite impracticable and that even to buy their bread meant a weekly trip to the nearest market.  No wonder the hastily boiled potatoes which were such anathema to Cobbett provided the easiest and cheapest means of staving off hunger.  Effectively, the cottage part of Cobbett’s economy was figurative only.  what he had to say only applied to prosperous farmers and smallholders of some substance, whose establishments automatically included a bakehouse and brewhouse.  Even then his instructions as to the mixing of the dough and the firing of the oven, although vivid and often quoted, are far from realistic.  Fifteen to twenty minutes fermentation for 25 kgs of flour mixed to dough …… is a good deal short of adequate.  Equally so is fifteen minutes for the firing of an oven large enough to hold fourteen 2 kg loaves and in which the heat has to be maintained for two hours.

Cobbett seemed to have little idea of the daily living arrangements or cooking facilities of the people he was ‘advising’.

Tomorrow Tarquin O’Flaherty will respond.